Online Level-Up Guide Part 3: Going for the Goal

Welcome back to the final part of the 3-part online level-up guide. If this is your first time here, I really recommend that you go back and check out part 1 and part 2 of the guides, following the links below.

Before we covered how to use your points as a barometer for what skills you should likely work to improve, as well as how to categorize other players based off of their points alone. The second part focused on how to utilize strategy over reaction online, so that your online ability will easily transfer over to off-line, live matches. So now that we have these two important skills, let’s tie them all together, shall we.

If you’re like most people, when you play fighting games online, your usual session goes something like this:

Hop online

Find a few matches

Beat a few people

Lose to a lot of people

Rematch some guy like 10 times and lose

Win one game

Decide to take the high road

Finish while you’re ahead.

If this is you, then I think you’re going to find this guide very helpful. A lot of the above is great if, you’re playing casually, but if you are trying to improve, it does very little for you. Playing competitively, when you go online, you should have a goal, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. For example, if you want to improve your anti-airing ability. Then when you go online, you should set a goal like so:

*Anti-air 90% of non-dive kicked jump attacks at neutral*

Now play some matches with intent and focus on that goal alone. If you lose the match, that’s okay, as long as you worked on achieving your goal. Do not get focused on only winning, because when you’re trying to improve a skill, you’re going to take some licks bringing that bad point up to snuff. The idea is to take all of the losses now, online, where it doesn’t matter instead of in semi-finals or grand-finals of a tournament. If you get frustrated, just remember the following line:

Lots of great players lose, but they know to lose when losing matters least.

If you’re like me, then you’re probably saying to yourself right now, “East, of course I already know about how to set goals.” I am glad, but honestly, how often do you actually put that into practice, and then follow it when you play online? I’m going to go out on a limb and assume not a whole lot. So try it out and after a while, I bet you 100 yen that you’ll see some improvement.

I guess the next logical step is for you to figure out where to start and what goals for yourself. If you have no clue where to start then I would recommend using another handy feature of online mode: Replays. Watch a few of your games and see if you can find some common bad traits you have against different opponents. If you’re having a difficult time finding your weaknesses, find an online community willing to look through some of your videos and give you some feedback. Many people are happy to do so.

Well that just about wraps things up on my end. I hope that you found these guides useful and if you have any questions, drop me a line on twitter @east_ml and while we’re on the twitter bit, we have a new twitter for the site as well. If you want to get updates when we publish a new guide, feel free to follow @drunkardshade for updates!